The Disconnect of Living in Two Worlds – Glasgow and Gaza

Has anyone else found it really diifcult to live in two media worlds at once these past weeks?

The Commonwealth Games have brought enormous energy, enjoyment, achievement and social cohesion; for which read a pervasive in your face friendliness from Glasgow people that is infectious, funny and incurably self-conscious without being anything other than glad to host the party and include everybody within loud shouting distance. The interviews with Glasgow folk are a credit to a city that knows its own history, and knows its own place, and is proud of both. Glasgow has been a whirring hub of life engaged in making a big thing happen and doing it in a way that is peculiarly Glaswegian and memorably Scottish. (Apart from not including the Proclaimers in the closing ceremony – what a missed opportunity that was!! 

From such humming euphoria, high visibility human togetherness, days of shared laughter and hopes, international cross cultural goodwill, we turn to the news from Gaza. That shift of focus has required a bewildering change of worldview, a psychological decompression chamber lest we absorb so much tragedy and suffering into minds that need time to adjust. The number dead has reached 1800 with 9,000 injured, the vast majority civilians. Another 10 died yesterday, taking shelter from the sun, under a tree, at the gate of a UN run school sheltering several thousand civilians.

The media constructed alternative worlds are truly bewildering and heartbreaking. Lifetime challenge and ambitions of atheltes, and the life destroying goals of Hamas and Israel; sport as a medium of friendship, and conflict as the nursery of future hatred, enmity and violence; the exchange of shuttlecocks, hockey balls, contrasts with crude rockets and flechette shells, drone missiles and precision air strikes; finish lines and endurance races, contrast with conflict borderlines and the endurance of a people with nowhere to go as the lines of lethal advance concentrate their numbers and the high explosive ordnance keeps raining.

I admit it. I am bewildered, emotionally and morally unsettled, not sure what to think, or do or say. Images of fireworks celebrating our human togetherness keep being contradicted by images of explosions and flashes of fire as death is dealt with computer precision. These past weeks have been so wonderful for Glasgow, so hellish for Gaza. So I do what I can; I sign the petitions; I blog and write to my MP and I argue with the "Israel can do no wrong lobby", and I pray. But none of that makes any visible difference to the inflicted misery and eclipse of mercy that is Israel and Gaza at war.

One of the most remarkable advances in human behaviour and social hopefulness was the establishing of the lex talionis principle, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. No that is not a licence for vengeance, it is an imposed constraint upon hatred, an agreed control of violence, a crude but essential justice based on proportionality, and with the intention that such exchange is limited to the offender and the offended. The collective punishment of the Palestinian people lacks all proportionality, has no relation whatsoever to justice, makes no pretence at limitation and is made worse not better by rhetoric about seeking to avoid civilian casualties when the numbers are as they are.

But then, this is the 21st Century, we know better than the ancients, our sophisticated weaponry doesn't require us to personally kill each person – that can be done remotely, more efficiently and with greater killing power. And when one protagonist couldn't care less about the lives of its own population, then the provocation takes on lethal persistence; and when the other protagonist has overwhelming military capacity to inflict death at will, it can be done with impunity until the international bystanding stops. And whether I like it or not, British arms sales to Israel make me implicit; and our Government's supine silence makes me ashamed; but I pray the Lord's Prayer, and believe in its hopefulness, its defiance of those who think their Kingdom is unshakeable and their will is to be done.